


Friendship and Fair Copy

by chainsaw_poet



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Apologies, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 10:06:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/697102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chainsaw_poet/pseuds/chainsaw_poet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"No one could be expected to think about the troubles of the world all the time. A man would go mad. Sometimes, however, one didn’t have a choice." </p><p>Combeferre is their guide, but even guides need their friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Friendship and Fair Copy

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the following prompt on the Les Mis kink meme, and tided up afterwards: In most of the fics I've read Combeferre is always the one taking care of everyone, making sure no situations get out of hand, helping couples getting together, studying when no one else will, making sure Enjolras doesn't get sick because he forgot to eat because of the protests... That's all perfectly in character, but even guides get stressed out. So, sorry, but I'll ask for two prompts around Combeferre needing to be taken care of for once. This is for the gen version, where something (loss of control due to stress, dozing off during a speech, having a meltdown, anything. Writer's choice) happens to him during a meeting and all the Amis help him.
> 
> Original fill can be found here:http://makinghugospin.livejournal.com/11667.html?thread=1839763#t1839763
> 
> Warnings for discussion of dead children, but nothing worse or more graphic than is in the book.

Only two more pages to go, Combeferre thought to himself as he turned over another sheet that was covered in the cramped scrawl of Enjolras’s handwriting. The pamphlet – a fiery indictment of the government’s failure to deal with rising bread prices – had to go to the printers first thing tomorrow morning if it was to be ready in time for Feuilly to distribute at the workers’ meeting next week. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that the last time they’d taken one of Enjolras’s pamphlets to be printed, the printer had taken one look at the manuscript before declaring that if he didn’t have a proper fair copy to set the type from next time, he’d be charging double. And even taking into account the generous allowances of some of the Amis, their funds didn’t stretch to that – especially so close to the end of the quarter.

Combeferre could see that the man had a point. Enjolras wrote so fast and in such a temper, correcting the text as he went along, that his script was close to illegible at times. And his friend had clearly been short of paper when he’d been composing; as the pamphlet reached its conclusion the lines inched closer together, gaps between words getting smaller. Combeferre sighed as he attempted to distinguish whether a particularly malformed letter was a collapsed ‘h’ or a larger-than-usual ‘n’; neither made particular sense in context of the rest of the word – but then again, Enjolras’s spelling also became rather unorthodox in fits of revolutionary fervour.

He had meant to finish the job last night, but the public lecture on agricultural reform he’d been attending had run over, and then he’d bumped into Bahorel on his way home, who had dragged him into the Corinthe to discuss the possibility of forging links with another student group that he’d encountered in a café on the Rue du Plâtre. In the end, it was after midnight when he’d returned to his rooms. He’d stayed up until three trying to decipher the text by the mean light of his oil lamp, before realising that he’d have to get some sleep to be in any shape for his anatomy class at the Necker in the morning, and promising himself that he’d finish it that evening. And he was almost finished. Of course, the whole process would have gone a lot faster if he could drag his mind away from that afternoon’s dissection class and… No. Stop thinking about it. Concentrate on the page in front of you.

He could have asked one of the others for help, of course. Most of them were in the Musain, and looking distinctly under-occupied. Bahorel was recounting a scrap he’d got into the previous weekend for Feuilly’s amusement, having co-opted Bossuet into portraying his adversary. Courfeyrac was teasing Jehan about his cravat, which was an almost implausible shade of purple and clashed horribly with pale green waistcoat he was wearing, even to Combeferre’s undiscerning eye. Only Enjolras and Grantaire were silent; the former staring at the fire – formulating his latest plan of action, no doubt - and the latter staring at the former, with a look of deep melancholy that was becoming worryingly familiar. Grantaire may have sometimes have been an annoyance when he made speeches, but he was only really trouble when he fell silent.

Combeferre was contemplating what on earth was to be done about Grantaire, and whether Courfeyrac or Bahorel could be relied upon to have some gentle words with him or whether Combeferre would have to do it himself, when a sudden weight on his shoulder interrupted the flow of his hand, sending ink splattering across the page.

“Damn!” he snapped before he could stop himself, turning round abruptly to find a slightly sheepish Joly standing behind him.

“Sorry, Combeferre - did I interrupt?” he asked. Combeferre exhaled firmly and schooled his features into something that he hoped resembled a placid expression.

“It’s fine. What do you want?”

“Two things actually. Do you still have your notes from Halaire’s lectures on the nervous system?”

“In my room, somewhere.” Third shelf in the bookcase to the left of the desk. Between his translation of Newton’s _Principia_ and his copy of Spinoza’s _Ethics_.

“Oh good,” Joly replied, visibly relieved. “I really did intend to go this morning, but I always forget how far it is from Musichetta’s rooms to the medical school, and she finally stopped sulking at me last night, and… Well, you don’t want to know that. Can I borrow them?”

“Of course.” Combeferre moved to turn back to his copying, but Joly wasn’t finished.

“I’ll come round after the meeting then? And while I’m there, if you don’t mind, could I use your stethoscope? Bossuet tidied mine away last week and now he can’t remember where he put it. I wouldn’t be concerned, only ever since came down with a cough two weeks ago I’ve had this dull ache in my chest, which gets worse when I inhale, and I’m certain I must have pleurisy, but I need a stethoscope to be absolutely sure,” Joly said quickly, wrapping an arm protectively around his chest as he caught his breath. Combeferre had his stethoscope in his bag, and would have given it to Joly there and then, if that had been what he really wanted.

“Come back to mine after the meeting and I’ll give you the notes and look you over,” Combeferre said wearily. The bright smile that Joly gave in return was almost worth it.

“Nothing’s too much trouble for you, is it?” he replied, rubbing Combeferre’s shoulder warmly before dashing off to see what Bossuet was up to. 

“Nothing at all,” Combeferre muttered to himself. He turned back to the page in front of him, seeing for the first time that the ten or so lines he’d written before Joly interrupted were absolutely ruined. Screwing the sheet into a tight ball did nothing to relieve the tension in his shoulders, and Jehan’s yelps and giggles at Courfeyrac’s attempts to divest him of his new cravat set him even further on edge. Couldn’t they be serious for once? Didn’t they realise that whilst they prattled about drinking wine and teasing each other, children were putting mud in their mouths instead of bread?

Courfeyrac forced himself to take a deep breath as he reached for a fresh sheet of paper. Of course the others realised. That’s why they were all here. No one could be expected to think about the troubles of the world all the time. A man would go mad. Sometimes, however, one didn’t have a choice. Like when the troubles of the world lay on a dissecting table in front of you, in the form of a body that was far too small to bear them. Far too small to bear anything at all.

Stop thinking about it.

Luckily, the nib of his pen was still in the pot of ink when the next voice startled him.

“Are you almost done?” Combeferre looked up to find Enjolras leaning the opposite side of the table, a stray blonde curl falling across his forehead. Without thinking, Combeferre’s glance darted to when Grantaire sat in the corner, fixated on their conversation, his gaze darkening by the second.

“Almost,” Combeferre said, forcing a hard smile.

“I want to start the meeting soon,” Enjolras added simply, as though Combeferre might actually have thought he was just checking to see how things were going. Combeferre’s reply came through gritted teeth

“As I said, almost done. Do feel free to start anyway; I’m sure I’ll keep up.”

“I can’t start the meeting. You’re supposed to be opening it by reporting on that lecture on agricultural reform you attended last night, remember?” Damn. Yes, Combeferre did remember. Well, he remembered now that Enjolras had mentioned it. Never mind – his notes were still in his bag, and it wasn’t as though anyone except Enjolras was going to listen anyway. As a group of young men who had dashed to Paris at the earliest opportunity, agricultural reform was rather low down their revolutionary agenda.

“Of course I remember,” Combeferre said smoothly. “Well, let’s begin, then. I can always come back to-”

It was at that precise point in his sentence that things really took a turn for the worse.

Later on, Bahorel would explain that he’d just been reaching the climax of his story, which involved the delivery of a right hook to his opponent’s jaw. Only Bossuet had ducked left rather than right, moving into, instead of away from Bahorel’s fist. And Bahorel was never one to throw a soft punch, even in jest. All that was left, as Joly so succinctly phrased it, was for the laws of momentum to do their work, sending Bossuet backwards into the table at which Combeferre was working.

Combeferre, of course, only saw the equal and opposite reaction that corresponded to these actions, which was for a full glass of red wine - set in front of him as motivation to finish the copying - to fall over, sending liquid all over his finished sheets.

The Amis, at least, had the politeness to fall silent in the face of catastrophe. Combeferre felt eight pairs of eyes upon him as he stared at the mess in disbelief, his pen still hovering over a now-soaked sheet of paper.

“Oh dear.” Courfeyrac was the first to break the silence, his words shocking Combeferre into a realisation of just how many hours of work had been instantly destroyed. On another day, he might simply have seethed silently, perhaps adding some words of chastisement about play-fighting at meetings. Today, however, the whole sorry business seemed only to exemplify the futility of, well, everything. After all what did it matter if the pamphlet got printed or not? It wouldn’t actually help anyone to buy bread. All they could do was comment after the fact. They couldn’t stop children from starving. No one had stopped that child from starving…

It took Combeferre a moment to realise that the laughter he could hear was his own.

“Oh dear.” Courfeyrac again, although this time with slightly more intensity as he flung down the cravat that he’d finally managed to take from Prouvaire and made his way over to Combeferre, the rest of the friends following suit. “Come on, then,” he began, sitting next to Combeferre. “No real harm done.” Enjolras, however, begged to differ. 

“Yes, there is. Those pages were supposed to go to the printer’s first thing tomorrow morning.”

“So, they’ll be a day late.” Bahorel punctuated his statement with a shrug. 

“And so miss the meeting of the factory workers that Feuilly is supposed to be attending – and you along with him. What are you supposed give them now? What is the point of our work if we don’t communicate it to the people?”

“Enjolras, this isn’t helpful just now,” Courfeyrac said firmly.

“What’s the point of our work anyway?” Combeferre responded, snatching a breath, the air suddenly feeling much too thin. “To call it work is a joke. If the police came in right now, they wouldn’t suspect a thing. Most of you just mess around, crashing into tables, ruining all of our efforts.”

“It wasn’t Bossuet’s fault,” Joly reasoned.

“I rather think it might have been my fault,” Bossuet said, looking contrite. 

“It was an accident,” Feuilly said. “Nobody meant it to happen, and we’re all sorry that your work got spoiled.”

“Oh, don’t bothering apologising. In any case, it doesn’t matter. None of it does.” Enjolras looked as though he were on the verge of challenging Combeferre to a dual. 

“You can’t possibly mean that,” he said.

“Of course, he doesn’t mean that,” Prouvaire said, adopting a placating tone. “Combeferre is just…” He trailed off, for once, unable to find words for Combeferre’s current state.

“Hysterical,” Joly volunteered, more than a hint of concern in his voice. 

“Upset,” Courfeyrac corrected. “And about more than just some spoilt manuscripts, I would imagine. But just how late were you up copying, by the way?” The direct question shocked Combeferre into a response.

“Until… Until three,” he confessed. His felt shoulders drop and, suddenly, he didn’t feel angry, just awfully, awfully tired.

“You should have asked for help,” Bossuet said.

“He shouldn’t have to ask; we ought to have offered,” Feuilly said, a little embarrassed. “I wasn’t doing anything important.”

“And I kept you in the Corinthe until almost midnight, why didn’t you say?” Bahorel added

“There are few things that should keep a man up that late, and all of them are more enjoyable than copying revolutionary pamphlets.” Courfeyrac was nothing if not well practised at keeping his tone light, but Combeferre couldn’t quite ignore the very serious look that he threw at Enjolras, who, finally heeding the message, stepped back from the table. Joly, meanwhile, positioned himself at Combeferre’s other elbow and took hold of his wrist, pressing two fingers to it; Combeferre couldn’t find the strength to fight him off.

“Honestly,” Joly fretted. “You’ll work yourself to death. Your heart is racing.”

“Does something pain you, Combeferre?” Jehan asked softly. 

Combeferre hadn’t been planning to tell them. Courfeyrac, as gallant with his friends as with his womenfolk, had given him the perfect excuse of being under-slept and irritable. But there was something about Jehen’s muted tone, and his odd phrasing that made Combeferre clench his fists until his knuckles went white and he knew that if he didn’t say it all then, he would just break.

“Yes.” Combeferre inhaled deeply. “We performed a dissection this afternoon at the Necker. A full autopsy, in fact, although not a particularly interesting case. Cause of death – as was instantly apparently – was an infection of the lungs, from which anyone who wasn’t horrible undernourished might have hoped to recover. All too common these days.” 

His words tumbled over one another; the faster he got it all out, the sooner it would be over. Purgatives were nasty, but catharsis was sometimes necessary and it was better if it was all done quickly. He couldn’t bear to look any of them, instead fixing his gaze on a single point on the table in front of him. “The subject was a child. Exact age unknown, but we estimated around three years old. It’s difficult to tell with children like that; they’re always small for their age.”

“Christ,” Bahorel muttered under his breath. 

“Oh, it’s not that it was a child. We have plenty of children on our dissection tables, it being the Necker. Besides, children die in the streets all the time,” he added bitterly. “We all know that.”

“Most of us don’t have to see it on a table in front of us,” Bossuet said, with a pointed look at Joly, who was anxiously biting on his lower lip. “It must have been horrible, Combeferre.”

“No, it wasn’t that. I mean, it was horrible. It is horrible – but dead children are nothing new. Starved children are nothing new. Which is why I can’t explain it. Perhaps it was because it was my turn to perform the dissection that day. We take turns you see, performing and watching. And today I was tasked with tracing my scalpel along his breast bone – no trouble in locating that, there was barely any flesh to cover it – and exploring what lay beneath. 

“Bodies tell stories, you know, if you let them and you know what you’re looking for. You can see a man’s whole life from his corpse. And I could see this lamentably short life in front of me. Wasting of the muscles. Ribs so brittle they had cracked from his coughing. A broken arm that hadn’t healed properly.” Combeferre’s hands was trembling now. “And his stomach. I cut it open, and there was mud inside of it. And I stared at it and thought, ‘how hungry do you have to be to put mud into your mouth?’

Courfeyrac reached over and took Combeferre’s hands, cradling their trembling fingers in his own.

“It must have been terrible,” he said, in a quiet level voice.

“But that’s just it – it wasn’t terrible. It was perfectly normal. The kind of thing one sees everyday in a Paris hospital. Nothing surprising. Nothing that one should get upset about. I shouldn’t… be upset about it.” Combeferre wasn’t sure that he could bear it anymore. The kindness – Courfeyrac’s hands over his own, Joly’s touch on his arm, Jehan’s soft words, Feuilly’s deep eyes – it was too much to bear. He would weep, and he would never stop.

“On the contrary.” Enjolras’s voice cut through the heavy silence from where he stood apart from the others. Combeferre had almost forgotten his presence. Enjolras stepped forward, golden hair glistening in the firelight. “To feel sorrow is both necessary and admirable. To harden our hearts to the tragedies of our age would be of little use and, worse, it would be wrong. You’re right to fear directionless sentimentality – weeping senselessly at the darkness without striking a match, or fearing that the spark will light a powder keg. But that’s not what this is. Without the sensation of pain, how would we know where to apply the cure?”

Combeferre removed his spectacles and pressed his palms into his eyes for a moment. But his eyes were dry when he lowered his hands.

“You’re mixing metaphors again, Enjolras,” he said hoarsely. Enjolras’s lips twisted into a wry smile.

“My apologies.”

And then, of all of them, it was Grantaire who knew exactly what to do next. As though he were handing out drinks at a dance, he placed a full glass of wine in Combeferre’s hand. “To replenish spirits,” he said smoothly.

“Thank you.” Grantaire bowed, somehow endowing the gesture with irony, receiving a clap on the shoulder from Bahorel for his pains.

“You know, when you leave out the classical allusions, you’re a rather fine orator,” Bahorel said.

“Well, perhaps, I shall compose an eulogy for the fallen manuscript pages. Cut down like Hector, in their prime. Fit now only to be thrown onto a funeral pyre…” Bousset groaned good-naturedly.

“You should stop while you’re ahead, Grantaire,” he said. “Besides, by virtue of my adopted namesake, I have a monopoly on funeral orations.”

“Actually, I was going to suggest that the pamphlet rise from its ashes. Or, rather, its damp depths,” Courfeyrac interrupted. “Enjolras’s originals survived, yes? Well, then. There’s nine of us. Jehen’s copy must be as fair as his complexion, and although Bahorel never writes any essays on the law, I’m sure he’s not entirely illiterate. Joly’s handwriting hasn’t quite been ruined by the medical profession – he doesn’t yet poison his patients with the script of his prescriptions – and I have been know to turn out a pretty hand, to win a pretty hand. Even Enjolras might be able to moderate his more radical tendencies. All together, it will be done in no time. Or at least, in good time for dinner.” Here, Courfeyrac picked up one of the sheets from which Combeferre had been copying, and made a pantomime of squinting at it. “Now does that say baker or boules? Is this even in French? Perhaps I should fetch Pontmercy to translate.”

“I’m not ever sure that’s a ‘b’ at the beginning,” Jehan added, peering over his shoulder. “Honestly, it’s a wonder there aren’t more mistakes in our materials.”

“I think it’s an ‘l’,” Feuilly said, joining in the game. “But that wouldn’t make sense at all. How on earth did you get this done the first time, Combeferre?”

They had all pulled up chairs around the table now, and Courfeyrac began to distribute the sheets as the rest of them hunted through bags for pens and ink. 

“You’re really all right?” he whispered to Combeferre, as he leaned over his shoulder to place two sheets in front of him. Combeferre looked around to his friends, jostling for space at the table, leaning into each other to decipher the words of their leader, bickering over who had stolen whose last usable nib, or who owed someone else a pot of ink. He nodded.

“Never better.”


End file.
